Back then I was wide-eyed, thin as a whistle and had a long mane of shoulder-length hair that I wore hunched up in a ponytail. I regularly donned square-toed harness boots and dressed like a reject from the local crack-smoking blues band (it was the late nineties, so bad taste and crappy clothing was de rigueur — this was way before The Fab Five).

I was on my own in México DF, one of the world’s largest cities. Half a block from my place, prostitutes fought for floor space with drug dealers. I shared my minuscule corner of the apartment building with two strippers, their cousin and a prodigiously licentious gay dude who would rotate boyfriends as frequently as I changed my underwear (roughly every three days).

Let’s-Call-Her-Crystal was a blonde bombshell with a body to die for and deep, unnaturally blue eyes that were perpetually covered with the wrong shade of makeup. She lived next door and worked the night-shift as a pole dancer at the Golden Club. To be honest, I had barely noticed her until the day she slipped the note under my door.

It flew into the air when I rammed the door open and ran out (a custom developed in response to Mr. Guevara’s notorious fixation with punctuality at Journalistic Integrity 101). It was written on a yellow post-it and said simply:

I’m your neighbour. I’d like to meet you. My phone No. is ####”

By this point I knew James (boyfriend-grinder) well enough to know that it wasn’t him who had left the note, so that left one of the three neighbours, whom I had noticed just enough to know that two were utterly hot and the other one was so-so. After school, as I punched the numbers on a payphone on my way to work, I reflected that it was a bit like playing russian roulette, with slightly better odds.

On the phone, we agreed on going for coffee that night. When I dropped by I realized I had lucked out. Crystal —forgiving the excessive makeup she was so fond of— looked stunning.

After talking for a while over coffee, she started coming on to me. I was sweaty, nervous as hell and didn’t quite know how to react (I think this was precisely what attracted her to me, and it is a charm I have completely lost over the years). We came back to her place, where she opened a drawer and pulled out a magazine (“Buenísimas”) which featured her as the centerfold. As she flipped through the pages, showing them to me, she told me how pissed off she had been at the photographer because of the main picture in her pictorial, which almost showed nipple. Hard as I tried, I could not conjure up thoughts of anything but thankfulness toward the guy.

At that time, I was struggling to maintain a very troubled long-distance relationship. On our last time together, we had agreed on giving it one more try. This was deeply ingrained in my mind as I ruefully avoided Crystal’s come-ons…

   — This entry will be continued next week.

— sergio on January 04, 2005